Eye Candy for Today: Adelaide Palmer still life

Still Life with Oranges, Adelaide Palmer
Still Life with Oranges, Adelaide Palmer (details)

Still Life with Oranges, Adelaide Palmer, oil on canvas, 16 x 24″ (40 x 60 cm). Link is to a page on Wikimedia Commons. I don’t know the location of the original.

I can’t find very many images or much information on Adelaide Palmer, a painter from New Hampshire who was active in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The brief bio on Vose Galleries indices that she studied at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, and later with John Joseph Enneking.

Her take on this seemingly simple still life subject is rich with tactile suggestion and interesting variation in color.

Not the Usual Van Goghs #4

Not the Usual Van Gogh's
Not the Usual Van Gogh's

In making decisions about what images they will show, art directors, publishers, reproduction print makers, and even museums, will often limit themselves to the most popular images in an artist’s oeuvre, particularly when dealing with very popular artists.

This leads to a condition I think of as the “Greatest Hits” syndrome; publishers don’t want to gamble on a possibly more interesting selection, and I suppose, understandably so. They’re simply weighing it as a financial decision, not an artistic one.

However, for those interested in art books and related items, the impression given is that the artists in question produced many fewer works than they actually did. As I’ve pointed out in three previous posts, this is certainly true in the case of Vincent van Gogh.

Here is another round of reproductions of lesser known works of Van Gogh, created over the short but astonishingly prolific 10 years or so that he painted.

In my past articles, I’ve linked to various sources of extensive listings of paintings by Van Gogh. In this case, I’ll point to Wikimedia Commons, which has a chronological list of all his known paintings (excluding watercolors and including a few questionable attributions), as a source of more “not the usual Van Goghs”.

Eye Candy for Today: Degas’ Woman on a Sofa

Woman on a Sofa, Edgar Degas, oil with touches of pastel ofer pencil
Woman on a Sofa, Edgar Degas, oil with touches of pastel ofer pencil

Woman on a Sofa, thined oil paint with touches of pastel over graphite, roughly 19 x 17″ (49 x 43 cm). Link is to image on the Metropolitan Museum of Art website, which has both zoomable and downloadable images.

The Met’s page for the piece indicates that it was not a preliminary work for another painting, but a work in itself. Drgas was apparently interested enough in pursuing the original drawing as larger and more complete that he expanded it by adding additional strips of paper to three sides.

I love the contrast between the delicately defined face of the woman and the rough, textural marks with which her form is indicated.